Quotes about earth
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“There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Preface
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“I saw the earth open like a huge mouth, then close again over the paved street. An old man was trapped by the foot. I ran to him, told him to be brave while I hacked the pavement with a fireman's axe. But I was too late. The vise tightened, bit his leg off at the knee. I carried him away. His knee is still there, a bloody souvenir sticking out of the earth.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Rhodora http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/rhodora.htm 1840s, Poems (1847)

Beauty

“I am every day more convinced that happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth.”

Josemaría Escrivá (1902–1975) Spanish theologian

#1005
The Forge (1987)

Happiness

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”

J. Paul Getty (1892–1977) American industrialist

Attributed

Business

“Translation:Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature mutilated, overexploited is not able to recover and we refuse to admit it. From North to South, it suffers from ill-development, and we are indifferent. Earth and humanity are in great peril and we are accountable.”

Jacques Chirac book Our house is on fire and we look away

Notre maison brûle et nous regardons ailleurs. La nature, mutilée, surexploitée, ne parvient plus à se reconstituer et nous refusons de l'admettre. L'humanité souffre. Elle souffre de mal-développement, au nord comme au sud, et nous sommes indifférents. La terre et l'humanité sont en péril et nous en sommes tous responsables. Statement at the earth summit in Johannesburg Elysee.fr http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/francais/interventions/discours_et_declarations/2002/septembre/discours_de_m_jacques_chirac_president_de_la_republique_devant_l_assemblee_pleniere_du_sommet_mondial_du_developpement_durable.1217.html dated sept 2nd 2002

Nature, Suffering, Housing, Indifference

“He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book Two, Part III “The Island”, Chapter 3 (p. 219)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

God, Fear, Reality, Sun

“No one can suffer for all time. No one will spend all his days on this earth in suffering. Every action brings its own result, and one gets one's opportunities accordingly.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 66-67]

Suffering, Time

“I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1340.htm to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393 1780s

Dead

“The muse lends me a lyre of myriad tunes,
her brush of myriad tints—I want to play
a wizard working wonders, magic tricks
with all the sounds and colors of the earth.”

Thế Lữ (1907–1989)

Source: An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press, 1996), ISBN 978-0300064100

Color

“It’s also time Australians stopped being apologetic about the values that have made our country as free, fair and prosperous as any on Earth.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

2015, The religion of Islam must reform (December 9, 2015)

Time, Country

“They did not deny the existence of authority. They recognized it and undertook to abide by it, and through obedience to it secure their freedom. They made their appeal and rested their cause not merely upon earthly authority, but in the very first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence asserted that they proposed 'to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.' And as they closed that noble document in which they submitted their claims to the opinions of mankind they again revealed what they believed to be the ultimate source of authority by stating that they were also 'appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of' their 'intentions.'.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

God, World, Law, Nature

“I far excel every one else in the whole world,
of those who still eat bread upon the face of the earth.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

VIII. 221–222 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

World

“Strepsiades: But come, by the Earth, is not Zeus, the Olympian, a god?
Socrates: What Zeus? Do not trifle. There is no Zeus.”

Aristophanés The Clouds

tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristoph.+Cl.+366 Clouds, line 366-367 (our emphasis on 367) The Greek-mythology equivalent of "There is no God." Clouds (423 BC)

God

“If there's a sword-like sang
That can cut Scotland clear
O a' the warld beside
Rax me the hilt o't here.

For there's nae jewal till
Frae the rest o earth it's free,
Wi the starry separateness
I'd fain to Scotland gie.”

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) Scottish poet, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve

To Circumjack Cencrastus

“Jivamukti Yoga is a path to enlightenment through compassion for all beings. Jivamukti is a Sanskrit word that means to live liberated in joyful, musical harmony with the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us—we belong to the Earth. Let us celebrate our connection to life by not enslaving animals and exploiting the Earth, and attain freedom and happiness for ourselves in the process. For surely, the best way to uplift our own lives is to do all we can to uplift the lives of others. Go vegan!”

Sharon Gannon (1951) American yoga teacher

Simple Recipes for Joy (2014)

Life, Music, Way, Freedom

“So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

The Creation, st. 6.
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)

God, World, Water, Sea

“If there are, let's say, 20 astronauts, there may be two women among those 20 astronauts. If there are 20 FBI guys, there's one woman and the rest are men. So when somebody writes a script about life, usually the leading role will be the man, because mostly what women do is at home taking care of the children…That's the most important job there is on Earth. And why shouldn't women have it since they are the better of the two sexes?”

Anne Bancroft (1931–2005) American actress

Associated Press interview (1997).

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we're going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what's more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. [… ] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
The Living Planet (1984)

Life, World, Universe

“One of those gifted ones that walk the earth,
Like angels in their beauty, and the while
The air is filled with music from their wings.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(31st January 1829) Lines to the Author after Reading the Sorrows of Rosalie
The London Literary Gazette, 1829

Beauty, Music, Angels

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men, Soul, Communication, Reality

“I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now... One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, p. 66

Love, Wisdom, Spring, Tree

“[Ron] Paul’s vision is as close to The Good Life as we could hope to come in the current ideological climate. Only tinny ideologues encased in worthless ideological armor – worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth – would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"High Priests of Pomposity Pan Ron Paul," http://www.wnd.com/2008/01/45602 WorldNetDaily.com, January 18, 2008. 2000s, 2008

Life, Hope

“The love that made Him to suffer passeth as far all His pains as Heaven is above Earth.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Ninth Revelation, Chapter 22

Love, Pain, Suffering

“God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

Love, God, Truth, Books

“Many of the passages that describe the millennial kingdom also, in continuity, describe the new heaven and the new earth—the eternal state.”

Paul P. Enns (1937) American theologian

Source: Heaven Revealed (Moody, 2011), p. 85

“Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies…
The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn’t just represent certain values—they were those values, in some way.”

Karl Schroeder (1962) Author. Technology consultant

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 23 (pp. 255-256).

People, Way, Change

“Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

Water, Baby, Falseness

“Earth-worms abound in England in many different stations. Their castings may be seen in extraordinary numbers on commons and chalk-downs, so as almost to cover the whole surface, where the soil is poor and the grass short and thin.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 9. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=24&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

Grass

“But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Silken Tent" (1942)
1940s

Love, Summer

“The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law (Shari’ah) and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of establishing God’s religion in the world would have been very easy for the Prophets of God. This is contrary to the evidence from the history of the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread over generations.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Ma'alim fi'l-Tariq (Signposts on the Road, or Milestones) (1964), Ch. 4, Jihad in the cause of Allah, p. 68.

God, World, Religion, Law

“When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out.Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all economy to justify the expense of the first — and for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment — 'tis a point of HONOUR.I need not be told, that the ethic writers have assigned this all to Patience; but that VIRTUE, methinks, has extent of domination sufficient of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled castles which HONOUR has left him upon the earth.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book IX (1767), Ch. 10.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

Fate, Change, Time, Waiting

“As the dominant mammal on the face of the earth, as the clever one, the only one as far as we know capable of reflection and of accumulating knowledge, our duty is plain, to serve the lesser creation, to keep our world clean and pass on to posterity a record of which we shall not feel shame.”

Frank Fraser Darling (1903–1979) British scientist

Wilderness and Plenty (1970); as quoted in Stephen R. L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 32.

World, Feeling, Knowledge

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War, People, World, Fear

“The Buddha appeared on earth to dispel by the illumination of knowledge the ignorance that had enveloped the human mass, to release the human soul from the prison-cell of desire into the wideness of the silence and peace of Nirvana.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

Mother India's Lighthouse: India's Spiritual Leaders (1971)

Peace, Soul, Knowledge, Silence

“The Flower of Old Japan.
The Flower above all other flowers,
The Flower that never dies;
Before whose throne the scented hours
Offer their sacrifice;
The Flower that here on earth below
Reveals the heavenly plan;
But only little children know
The Flower of Old Japan.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Song
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Children, Flowers

“Snow is a strange white word.
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter's cost.
Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know.
No man knows why.
In all men's hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face.
God's blood is shed.
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
O! ancient crimson curse
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

On Receiving News of the War (1914)

Men, God, Children, Kiss

“The Supreme God (kaḥ) (Rāma) [is resplendent] on [both] the earth (kau) and in Sāketaloka (ke); from him there is pleasure in the universe and in the sound of the peacock (kekakekākaḥ); he takes pleasure and bliss in the caw of the [Kākabhuśuṇḍi] crow (kākakākākakaḥ); from him there is pleasure for all the worlds (kakaḥ); for him the pain [of exile] is a pleasure (kākaḥ); his crow ([Kākabhuśuṇḍi]) is praiseworthy (kākaḥ); from him there is pleasure for Brahmā (kakaḥ); he calls out [to the devotees] (kākaḥ); from him there is pleasure for Kukā or Sītā (kukākaḥ); he calls out to the [Kākabhuśuṇḍi] crow (kākakaḥ); and from him there are worldly fruits and the bliss of liberation (kukaḥ). ॥ 20.92 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

kaḥ kau ke kekakekākaḥ kākakākākakaḥ kakaḥ ।
kākaḥ kākaḥ kakaḥ kākaḥ kukākaḥ kākakaḥ kukaḥ ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

God, Pain, Pleasure, World

“In Islam, there is no priesthood, and no intermediary between the creature and The Creator; but every Muslim from the ends of earth or in the paths of the sea has the ability of himself to approach his Lord without priest or minister. Nor again can the Muslim administrator derive his authority from any papacy, or from Heaven; but he derives it solely from the Muslim community. Similarly, he derives his principles of administration from the religious law, which is universal in its understanding and application and before which all men come everywhere as equals.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Social Justice in Islam (1953), p. 30

Men, Law, Communication, Understanding

“If this property of complexity could somehow be transformed into visible brightness so that it would stand forth more clearly to our senses, the biological world would become a walking field of light compared to the physical world. The sun with its great eruptions would fade to a pale simplicity compared to a rose bush, an earth worm would be a beacon, a dog a city of light, and human beings would stand out like blazing suns of complexity, flashing bursts of meaning to each other through the dull night of the physical world between. We would hurt each other‘s eyes. Look at the haloed heads of your rare and complex companions. Is it not so?”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Franklin Tugwell (1973) Search for alternatives: public policy and the study of the future. p.xv; cited by several times by Tony Buzan in 1978, 1991, 2006; and in multiple sources.
Source: The step to man, 1966, p.151

World, Dogs, Sense, Light

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Men, God, War

“Genius hath electric power
Which earth can never tame,
Bright suns may scorch and dark clouds lower,
Its flash is still the same.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

Marius amid the Ruins of Carthage

Sun

“Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Beauty, Feeling, Waiting

“A gunner owes consideration to the birds and to the land itself. He usually does not own the deed, but in a strange way he possesses a grouse covert as he is possessed by it, holding special title to that particular corner of this earth, a carry-over from the age when man discovered wild land and made it his.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Age, Way, Bird

“There was a treasure in the earth which the Lord loved. I marvelled and thought what it might be, and I was answered in mine understanding: It is a food which is delectable and pleasant to the Lord.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 51

Love, Food, Understanding

“Of all the months that fill the year
Give April's month to me,
For earth and sky are then so filled
With sweet variety!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“I dream I am the chosen Poet,
Who knows all there is to know on Earth,
The one whose inspiration’s pure and perfect,
And captures infinity in a verse!I dream a verse of mine has all the brightness
To light the whole world! And it will please
Even those who long and die of sadness!
And even wise, unhappy souls it will appease.”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Sonho que sou a Poetisa eleita,
Aquela que diz tudo e tudo sabe,
Que tem a inspiração pura e perfeita,
Que reúne num verso a imensidade!Sonho que um verso meu tem claridade
Para encher todo o mundo! E que deleita
Mesmo aqueles que morrem de saudade!
Mesmo os de alma profunda e insatisfeita!
Quoted in Trocando olhares (1994), p. 131
Translated by John D. Godinho
Book of Sorrows (1919), "Vaidade"

World, Sadness, Dreams, Soul

“Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Light, Success, Clothes

“Don't try to sell me on death, Odysseus.
I'd rather be a hired hand back up on earth,
Slaving away for some poor dirt farmer,
Than lord it over all these withered dead.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book XI, lines 510–513; spoken by the ghost of Achilles.
Translations, Odyssey (2000)

Death, Dead

“Who knows but on their sleep may rise
Such light as never heaven let through
To lighten earth from Paradise?”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

A Baby's Death.
Undated

Sleep, Light

“The more I see of Arabs the less I think of them. By having studied them a good deal I have found out the trouble. They are the mixture of all the bad races on earth, and they get worse from west to east, because the eastern ones have had more crosses.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Letter to Frederick Ayers (5 May 1943), published in The Patton Papers 1940-1945 (1996) edited by Martin Blumenson, p. 243

Thinking, Study

“Wisdom and truth, the offspring of the sky, are immortal; while cunning and deception, the meteors of the earth, after glittering for a moment, must pass away.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 241.

Wisdom, Truth

“In the center sits Mary, with her crown on her head and her son in her lap, enthroned, receiving the homage of heaven and earth; of all time, ancient and modern; of all thought, Christian and Pagan; of all men, and all women; including if you please, your homage and mine, which she receives without question, as her due; which she cannot be said to claim, because she is above making claims; she is empress. Her left hand bore a sceptre; her right supported the child, who looks directly forward, repeating the mother's attitude, and raises his right hand to bless, while his left rests on the orb of empire. She and her child are one.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Women, Men, Question, Support

“Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.”

Paul Erdős (1913–1996) Hungarian mathematician and freelancer

As quoted in "Ramsey Theory" by Ronald L. Graham and Joel H. Spencer, in Scientific American (July 1990), p. 112-117

World, Time

“Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.
This can be such a moment.
Forces now are converging that make possible, for the first time, the hope that many of man's deepest aspirations can at last be realized. The spiraling pace of change allows us to contemplate, within our own lifetime, advances that once would have taken centuries.
In throwing wide the horizons of space, we have discovered new horizons on earth.
For the first time, because the people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1960s, First Inaugural Address (1969)

War, People, World, Peace

“There is no more perfect picture on the earth, or within the imagination of man, than a mother holding in her thrilled and happy arms a child, the fruit of love.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Love, Imagination, Perfection, Happiness

“… happiness is not for this world — a conviction that cannot be too soon acquired : it will destroy a thousand vain expectations, dissipate the most perplexing of our illusions — the early knowledge that life is but a trial, whose triumph is hereafter, and this earth a place appointed for that sorrow and patient endurance which is gradually fitting us for a better and a happier state.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Life, World, Knowledge, Happiness

“Would that we two were lying
Beneath the churchyard sod,
With our limbs at rest in the green earth's breast,
And our souls at home with God.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

The Saint's Tragedy (1848), Act ii, scene ix, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Attributed

God, Home, Soul, Lying

“High state, the bed is where misfortune lies,
Mars most unfriendly, when most kind he seems,
Who climbeth high, on earth he hardest lights,
And lowest falls attend the highest flights.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Chè fortuna quaggiù varia a vicenda,
Mandandoci venture or triste, or buone:
A' voli troppo alti e repentini
Sogliono i precipizi esser vicini.
Canto II, stanza 70 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Light

“Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It's not an idea, it's a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth… I have nothing to do with Conceptual art [in contrast to his Physical Art, as Carl Andre called his sculpture art already in 1969]]. I'm not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I'd be in a field where what we think in is ideas… I don't really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. [quote from a talk with the audience, December 1969]”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 12

Art, Way, Quotes, Idea

“Behold the sword of the Lord will descend suddenly and quickly upon the earth.”
Ecce gladius Domini super terram, cito et velociter.

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) Italian Dominican friar and preacher

Motto he beheld in a vision (December 1492), as quoted in History of the Christian Church, Vol. V (1910) by Philip Schaff, and David Schley Schaff p. 688
Behold the sword of the Lord, swift and sure, over the earth.
As quoted in Books: The Sword of God" in TIME (17 August 1959)

“Men are made of the dust of the earth.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Men

“By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

People, World, Decision, Country

“Hark, below, the many-voiced earth,
The chanting of the old religious trees,
Rustle of far-off waters, woven sounds
Of small and multitudinous lives awake,
Peopling the grasses and the pools with joy,
Uttering their meaning to the mystic night!”

William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910) United States dramatist and poet

' Act II.
The Fire-Bringer (1904)

People, Tree, Grass, Water

“A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage… And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad…”

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) painter, poet, writer

Ecuador (1929)

Stupidity, Sadness, Sex, Feeling

“The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at its best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Saturday Pioneer (3 January 1891)
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (1890 and 1891)

War, Decision, Loss, Time

“Prostrate on earth the bleeding warrior lies,
And Isr'el's beauty on the mountains dies.
How are the mighty fallen!
Hush'd be my sorrow, gently fall my tears,
Lest my sad tale should reach the alien's ears:
Bid Fame be dumb, and tremble to proclaim
In heathen Gath, or Ascalon, our shame
Lest proud Philistia, lest our haughty foe,
With impious scorn insult our solemn woe.”

William Somervile (1675–1742) English poet

The Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan.

Sadness, Beauty, Mountain, Tear

“At worst, they were vile creatures who needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. At best, such behavior shows a dangerous lack of self-control. The first business of a warrior is self-restraint”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Behavior, Business

“Life is too short for me to worry about something I have no control over that I don’t even know will happen. People ask ‘if Earth is going to be swallowed by a black hole or if there is some disturbance in the spacetime continuum should we worry about it?’. My answer is ‘no’ because you won’t know about it until it crosses your… your place in space-time. Your beats come to you when nature decides it’s the right time… be it the speed of sound, the speed of light, the speed of electrical impulses we will forever be victims of the time delay between information around us and our capacity to receive it.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

WNYC Radio Podcast, RadioLab, "Shorts: What a Slinky Knows" (29 August 2012), Minute 11:33 http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/sep/10/what-slinky-knows/ 2010s

Life, People, Nature, Light

“The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves at the forefront of the column of the true love revolution. Together they have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced on every corner of the globe.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom, Address to the United States Congress http://www.unification.net/2004/20040323_1.html (2004-03-23)

Love, World, Family, Way

“Whether I'm a Super Bowl Champion or a regular guy stocking groceries at the Hy-Vee, sharing my faith and glorifying Jesus is the central focus of my time on this earth.”

Kurt Warner (1971) American football quarterback

Kurt Warner's Testimony, November 16, 2008, Eadshome.com, July 19, 2006 http://www.eadshome.com/KurtWarner.htm,

Faith, Guy, Time

“Then he rises from the table and goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane; there he sinks down – oh, that it had happened already! He sinks down, doomed (dodsens) – indeed, was he really any more a dying man (Doende) on the cross than in Gethsemane! If the suffering on the cross was a death agony – ah, this agony in prayer was also a mortal combat; nor was it bloodless, for his sweat fell like drops of blood to the earth.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 63
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

Death, Suffering

“There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

Source: On Death and Dying (1969), Ch. 2

Pain, Sense, Suffering

“Nature has put itself the problem of how to catch in flight light streaming to the Earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

in Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel, [Julius Robert von Mayer, Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, Cotta, 1867, 53-54]
Original: Die Natur hat sich die Aufgabe gestellt, das der Erde zuströmende Licht im Fluge zu erhaschen, und die beweglichste aller Kräfte, in starre Form umgewandelt, aufzuspeichern. Zur Erreichung dieses Zweckes hat sie die Erdkruste mit Organismen überzogen, welche lebend das Sonnenlicht in sich aufnehmen und unter Verwendung dieser Kraft eine fortlaufende Summe chemischer Differenzen erzeugen.

Nature, Problem, Light

“There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

Source: The Defendant (1901), "A Defence of Baby-Worship"

Truth, Religion, Star, Understanding

“Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Death, Beauty, Dreams, Way

“Conservatives view America as President Abraham Lincoln viewed it; as the 'Last Best Hope of Earth.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

2010s, Why the Left Hates America (2015)

Hope

“It is intended that we shall accomplish all, through law, that we can accomplish for ourselves. God gives every bird its food, but does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 367.

God, Law, Food, Way

“Heaven unites again the links that Earth has broken!
For on Earth so much is needed, but in Heaven Love is all!”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Philip and Mildred".
Legends and Lyrics: Second Series (1861)

Love

“Earth, thou grain of sand on the shore of the Universe of God; thou Bethlehem, amongst the princely cities of the heavens; thou art, and remainest, the Loved One amongst ten thousand suns and worlds, the Chosen of God! Thee will He again visit, and then thou wilt prepare a throne for Him, as thou gavest Him a manger cradle; in His radiant glory wilt thou rejoice, as thou didst once drink His blood and tears, and mourn His death! On thee has the Lord a great work to complete.”

Wilhelm von Pressel (1821–1902) German official and railway engineer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 102.

Love, Death, God, World

“Here saw I verily that if He shewed now us His Blissful Cheer, there is no pain in earth or in other place that should aggrieve us; but all things should be to us joy and bliss.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 21

Pain, Joy

“And how high is Christ's cross? As high as the highest heaven, and the throne of God, and the bosom of the Father — that bosom out of which forever proceed all created things. Ay, as high as the highest heaven! for — if you will receive it — when Christ hung upon the cross, heaven came down on earth, and earth ascended into heaven.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 171.

God, Christ

“Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy.”

Nick Bostrom (1973) Swedish philosopher

Albert, a fictional dog in Golden https://nickbostrom.com/fable/retriever.html (2004)

Health, Disease, Dreams, Nature

“Oh, where is man—
That mortal god, that hath no mortal kin
Or like on earth? Shall Nature's orator—
The interpreter of all her mystic strains —
Shall he be mute in Nature's jubilee?”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus

God, Nature

“In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

Music

“When the first just and friendly man appeared on the earth, from that day a fatal Waterloo was visible for all the men of pride and fraud and blood.”

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Coming People (1897).

Men, Fraud, Appearance

“Sweet the rose which lives in Heaven,
Although on earth ’tis planted,
Where its honours blow,
While by earth’s slaves the leaves are riven
Which die the while they glow.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

“After a large earthquake the earth "rings" like a bell; this motion can be observed on sensitive instruments up to a month after a large event. These oscillations have specific frequencies which are properties of the whole earth and which can be measured very accurately indeed. The lowest frequency oscillation has a period of about one hour. Any combination of seismic waves can be represented as an equivalent combination of normal modes. In practice the mode representation is most useful at low frequency — for seismic waves above about 40 s — since at higher frequencies the number of modes becomes prohibitively large.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

[Seismology and plate tectonics, 1990, http://books.google.com/books?id=tZRxPzwoChIC&pg=PA5] (p. 5)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

“Many a man may have his doubts for the moment, but when all comes to all and a long view is taken, one discovers usually that things have been making some sort of forward progress, some headway or other. And a man's dreams have a habit of coming true, more especially if he has made no particular effort to fulfill them ... It is particularly supposed that when a man has made himself worthy of living in a real house, he will be given a real house to live in; it sprouts out of the earth for him of its own accord, they say; life bestows on the individual all that he is worthy of, and the same is said to be true of the nation as a whole.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

Life, Dreams, Effort, Housing

“Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings. As soon as one does work on walls, the idea of using the whole wall follows. It means that the art is intimately involved with the architecture. It is available to be seen by everyone. It avoids the preciousness of gallery or museum installations. Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow," 2003

Art, Idea, Understanding, Drawing

“Truth is Thy primal word; at thy behest
The generations pass - O aid our quest
For Thee, and set my host of songs on high,
And let my psalmody come very nigh.
My praises as a coronal account,
And let my prayers as Thine incense mount.
Deem precious unto Thee the poor man's song,
As those that to thine altar did belong.
Rise, O my blessing, to the lord of birth,
The breeding, quickening, righteous force of earth.
Do Thou receive it with acceptant nod,
My choicest incense offered to my God.
And let my meditation grateful be,
For all my being is athirst for Thee.

from Millgram, A. E., Anthology of Medieval Hebrew Literature, Abelard, 1961.”

Yehuda he-Hasid (1140–1217) German philosopher

Shir Hakovod, trans. from the Hebrew by Israel Zangwill

God, Truth, Literature, Birth

“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other vist the human race.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter VII, paragraph 20, lines 2-4

Death

“I switched on the high speed recorder and it came blip…. blip…. blip…. blip…. blip…. Clearly the same family, the same sort of stuff and that was great, that was really sweet. It finally scotched the little green men hypothesis cos it's highly unlikely there's two lots of little green men, opposite sides of the universe, both deciding to signal to a rather inconspicuous planet earth, at the same time, using a daft technique and a rather common place frequency. It has to be some new kind of star, not seen before, and that then cleared the way for us publishing, going public!”

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943) British scientist

Beautiful Minds (2010)

Men, Family, Way, Star

“God, Whose hand holds stars, as we lump earth
In our fingers, give us power, give us light
To hold all love within our breast's small space.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

Love, God, Star, Light

“Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe… unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom, and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 41

Life, Secret, Dreams, Star

“Now I wonder what our knowledge has in common with God's knowledge according to those who treat God's knowledge… Is there anything else common to both besides the mere name? …there is an essential distinction between His knowledge and ours, like the distinction between the substance of the heavens and that of the earth.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.20

God, Knowledge

“We tend to think of [Hitler] as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an elite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he was a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at least seems to bring such events to order. But all such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the Volk as an inimical presence.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

God, People, Age, World

“When I reflect on the natural world and its glorious messages for us, I remember our responsibility to restore and preserve it, to work toward a sustainable future in which the human community lives in harmony with nature. We have a sacred duty to the earth itself, to one another, and to all the other species that inhabit our planet, to live in a state of friendship with the natural world, enhancing its life by simplifying our needs and desires.”

Wayne Teasdale (1945–2004) American writer

Source: A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life (2003), p. 8

Life, Friendship, World, Communication

“To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 166
Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 352 (footnote); citing F. Uberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. 1, p. 71.
Variant: To a wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland.

Soul

“To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness. It is understanding and appreciating the idea that you will be the only you to ever live upon this earth, that when you die so will all of your fantastic possibilities. It is the realization that even you are not totally aware of the wonders which lie dormant within yourself.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)

Love, Lie, Idea, Understanding

Quotes about earth page 32

Quotes about earth
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